When The Medley of Mast and Sail I was published, it was so titled in the expectation that others in the series would follow. In the event, popular demand ensured publication of this much bigger book, The Medley of Mast and Sail 2. This is not volume Two of its predecessor but the second in a series of self-sufficient books. The common theme is implicit in the title: the setting of merchant sailing craft within the perspective of each other and of other aspects of sail that exercise men's minds today—preservation, training, aberrations of yachtsmen, and even the revival of merchant sail. The well-known clippers and famous four-masters were no more important to those concerned with them, and to their local economies, than were the dhows on the Indian Ocean, or are the prahu craft today within their environments. A wool clipper could no more match a collier brig at her job than the collier brig could vie with the clipper in hers. Each type was fitted for a purpose, individual vessels varying in their performance.
Some readers of the first book, experts within their own fields, have joined the contributors to this one to its great gain because, despite containing no less than 526 photographs (some of exhibition standards, some of immense interest), it is no mere "picture book." It contains a solid and informed text, which has been divided into more distinct sections than that of its predecessor. The authors, many of whom have had much practical experience in sail, discount the term "romance," which is so often applied to sailing. That it had a "fascination"—a much more appropriate word—is made abundantly manifest in these pages.
In response to popular request, this second Medley has broadened its base and seeks also to demonstrate to some extent how a sailing ship was worked. We are in an age when oil resources are diminishing and becoming ever more expensive and when men, realizing that the wind is still free, are turning back to thoughts of sail as an economic motive power. Coal and pit-props may not be inspiring cargoes, but the reader may judge whether the Breton schooners running into the Bristol Channel were one whit less successful within their spheres than the tea clippers were within theirs; he may ponder on the host of short-sea brigs and other craft that traded with such regularity but seldom hit the head- lines, and on whether it is really sensible to consider the resuscitation of giant schooners. He may note, too that the photographs in three sections—the Prahu, Xavega and Moliciero—were taken in the late 1970s.
Large and small vessels, their triumphs and disasters and some of their ports, are presented without fear or favour. They were all a part of the playing and, if the curtain rang down long ago, while they were onstage, the actors knew no class distinctions, but lay in dock or made sail together on equal terms, each demanding a common seamanship, now all but forgotten, that bred mutual respect. Historians—not the ships or their men—created the distinctions that have taken root in peoples' minds!
—from the dust jacket
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